Breaking Up With Your Best Friend

Candy -- NYU

Knowing when to end a long term friendship can be more difficult than any of us would ever like to admit. Wouldn’t it just be a hell of a lot easier if our oldest and supposedly closest friends never bugged out? If they could just stay calm and always be that chill girl we used to kick it with…all would be well with the world. But the fact of the matter is this: A lot of girls go “crazy” eventually and this easily includes girls you’ve known “forever”.

Not that long ago, I moved my best friend since elementary school into my apartment. At first, it was totally awesome. Despite the fact that we had certainly had more than one rough patch in our history of being friends; we were still getting along rather famously once we were living together. That was…of course…until I really started to see how nuts she was.

She was a pathological liar. But this was something that I had always known. She was obsessive with guys. This too was something that I had always known. She had a high level of respect and regard for me…again, something that I had always known. However, I had no clue how far she could possibly take any of these aspects of her character.

FIRST came the jealousy. I had recently started to rearrange my diet and lifestyle, finally putting my foot down and wanting to be healthier over all. In the process of doing this, I ended up dropping a few pounds. She, on the other hand, had always struggled with her weight, but was never quite willing to compromise her tendency to over-eat in exchange for the body she wanted. So when I dropped down to 125 at 5’7 (please note that this is a totally acceptable weight), she started to accuse me of being “scary skinny” and actually called me Nicole Richie.

I brushed off her jealousy.

NEXT came the obsessiveness. A friend of mine whom she’d never met sent me a package once. I found out months later that she was so impressed with the care package that he sent to me, that she decided she would certainly fall in love with him if she ever met him. And so she had taken his address off of the package and kept it tucked away in her room. God knows why. What would she possibly do with the address of someone whom she’d never met?

THEN came the insanity. Before I knew it, she was confessing to me and total strangers simultaneously that she had had a lock of my hair in her room since high school. She started lying to me about where she went. She was diagnosed with a STD (but refused to tell me which one) and yet she continued to hang out with my guy friends one on one (of course she’d lie and tell me she was at work and then the guys, who were initially MY friends, would later tell me that they had hung out with her).

I started to not trust her. I started to disbelieve everything she had ever said to me. And once I started piecing together all of the little crazy bits…she had to move out. And…she had to stop being my BFF.

The fact of the matter is that people like me try to cling onto things just in order to make them “work”. I’m so loyal it’s disgusting. However, everyone is entitled to make decisions involving their life and…hey! Sometimes best friends go nuts.

So if your BFF has a lock of your hair in her bedroom…it may be time to have the break up talk.